A recent Talkshop comment led me to look at a data directory where something tripped a thought

There is an earth affecting proton event dataset running from 1976, named SPE (Solar Proton Event). These are rare and erratic in time.

A very difficult maths problem is pulse density integration, one of the reasons why producing a statistical distribution shape is very hard where the data is sparse and spasmodic.

I’ve faked up some kind of meaningful plot. Far from ideal so don’t be misled.

SSN is from SIDC

Taking the natural log of the energy value produces something sane looking, intuitively would be something like that. Added in some missing points for years with no events. Event data is provided to the second via NOAA.